Novels, NaNo, and No Organization

I have been mentally lax for such a long time now I can't seem to get my mental muscles back in shape.  I'm participating--in a fashion--in the #novelengage Twitter chat Lani Diane Rich of StoryWonk started.  It's a great idea, this engaging daily with your novel even if it's for a short time.  Before I went to Chicago I was doing pretty well.  Since I've been back, I just can't seem to get back in the swing of things.

It's okay, though.  I have a plan.  Sunday I started reading Larry Brooks'(of Storyfix.com) book Story Structure--Demystified.  I really like the way he breaks everything down.  Most if not all of it is stuff I've picked up in various places or just through my own observations about storytelling, but Mr. Brooks does a great job of clarifying the stages of storytelling.  I also like the breakdown of how much of your novel should be part 1, part 2, etc.  He even gives some info on approximately how many scenes should be in each section.  That's really useful stuff for a newbie who's never finished a novel length work and has never actually outlined one, either.

So I'm going to finish reading the book, writing down the story ideas it's stirring up for me, and then I'm going to actually write down my outline ideas.  I'm going to push myself to not panic because I don't have all of my key scene ideas yet--I'm just going to do the parts I know and then worry about filling in the rest.  I'm going to keep writing my morning/daily pages to help me control the anxiety that keeps stopping me.  This week, I am going to stop freezing up because of things that might happen and just do something, anything to move myself along.

Plotting, Pages, and Pantsing

I am so glad that Jamie Ridler is doing this September morning pages check-in.  It's really been helping me dive back in to my daily pages because when I've been tempted to skip them I remember that I told people I was going to do them every day in September.  And then I sit down, pick up my pen, and get them written.

And because I've been doing my pages for a few days in a row now, I'm starting to dig in to things I need to be focusing on or working on or thinking about.

First, I've been contemplating my writing, especially how I write.  My natural tendency in writing is to be a pantser (you know, writing by the seat of your pants not knowing what's going to happen next).  This is fun.  It also doesn't work for me. I have yet to finish a novel length work this way.  I always peter out partway through, and a big part of this is because I don't have any ideas for what's going to happen next or where I'm trying to go.

I don't every want to plot out every little thing that's going to happen--I think that would bore me and keep me from writing the story because I would already know everything.  But it's become clear to me that I need to do more planning than I have in the past to help me get where I want to be as a writer.  I really need to have a solid foundation of major points in place before I write.  That way, even though I might not know exactly how each scene will play out until I write it, I'll have an idea of what each big scene will be about.  Now I have to figure out a good way to do this sort of planning I think I need if I'm going to manage to actually finish a novel.  So tonight, after I write this, I'm hunkering down with a bunch of books and notes and websites and piece together something that feels right for me.

A lot of my daily pages the past few days have been about my writing and what I need to do to be the writer I want to be.  But I also dredged up some interesting questions that I realized were bothering me enough that they were keeping me away from my daily pages.

See, I used to write in a journal constantly.  I had it with me all the time, along with my arsenal of colored pens, and I would write little bits and pieces here and there plus sit down to really long writing sessions almost every day.  But that was "journaling" or, after I read Natalie Goldberg's writing books, "writing practice."  There was a lot of similarity to morning pages because I did a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing, but there was always the intention of keeping those journals, maybe perusing them at a later time to search out little nuggets of really good description or dialogue or something that I might want to use later.

The morning pages seem to me to be throwaway pages.  They aren't journal pages or writing practice to be kept and possibly used or at least appreciated later.  And I find that I don't like that idea.  I don't like them being just a brain dump with no other purpose.  And so I've given myself permission to do things like play with rhymes and scenery descriptions if I want to and if that's what's on my mind when I sit down to write.  And I'm doing the daily pages in my regular journal along with anything else I feel like sticking in there.  I feel that I'm getting a lot of benefit from doing the pages (as you can see above), so I don't want to get hung up on what is probably, in the end, a really minor bit of semantics.

Plotting Along

I'm a writer.  I'm sure somewhere in the fine print it says that I get to make bad puns and plays on words.

Seriously, though, I am plotting right along.  Slowly, in and amongst other things going on in my world, but I am managing to return to my story on a regular basis.  And this isn't a frenzied, NaNoWriMo sort of immersion, either.  It's becoming part of what I do every week.  "This is what I do--I go to work, grocery shop, plan and cook dinners, work on my story."  It's nice, having my writing start to turn into one of my regular things.

Right now, I'm working on my major plot points and twists.  I've used Aristotle's Incline and the three act structure in the past.  Right now, I'm working with Dan Wells' 7-point System (you can get a Power Point presentation or watch a video presentation of it--both are linked from that page).  I'm liking this because it's helping me put a few more important things in place, but I'm still not getting so bogged down in planning that there's no story left to write.

My basic idea for the story is good.  A few of the things that I thought of and wrote down are still going to be in the story.  But I'm really starting this over from scratch, from the ground up, and that's exciting.  I think this time I know more about what this story needs, so I think I can make it good.  But not if I keep writing this blog post instead of working on the story, so I'm out of here.

Novel Ideas

Yeah, it's a bad pun.  But they're so hard to resist!

I've been working on a series of plotting exercises for NaNoWriMo, but they can be used any time you're starting a new novel.

Plotting and Scheming

I hope you find these useful.  Let me know if there's anything I can clarify.  Happy writing!

Leaps and bounds

You know how sometimes you're slogging along through something and you're sure you're never going to make any real progress and you're starting to feel hopeless? And then something small happens, and suddenly you leap forward and start racing along, cruising smoothly through things that just yesterday seemed like great, impassable barriers?

Yep, that's me right now. In pulling out Ordinary Girl and starting to work on it again, I decided to take a look forward in the Think Sideways course to see how my working style matched up to things talked about in the course. And it meshed! And it all made sense! And I'm so excited now about the course and my book! And I realized that I was having such a hard time moving through the early parts of planning in the course because I'm actually good at those early stages, my system works very well and does the same thing (some of it is even identical). So, I am working through the plotting section of the course, using what I already have for Ordinary Girl and adding to it.

So right now I'm not writing new words, but I am working on the book, I'm excited by it, I'm getting some good insights (although I found a sticky point early on that I need a better plan for--more on the later). I'm finishing this book. I believe I will have a full first draft finished by the end of September, although I may revise that as I get a better feel for this system I'm putting in place.

Now, about that sticky point...Early in my story, my main character comes across a group of faeries in a derelict section of the city. The faeries see her, too, and the main faerie takes offense and decides to make MC's life miserable. Now granted, the MF is malicious and spiteful and generally a bitch. But would just having a human see her accidentally set her off enough to start being a stalker? I changed it so that my MC saw her doing something ungraceful, maybe stumbling over debris in the alley or something mildly embarrassing like that. But I don't know if even a malicious faerie would bother stalking a human over that. So what is it that MC sees that causes MF to be out to get her? That's what I'm working on tonight. I'm going to get back to it now, do some freewriting and see what I can come up with.

Character or Plot?

Well, this was supposed to be posted yesterday, but we had a power outage last night so I wasn’t able to finish it and get it online. Anyhow…

Right now, as I am working to fine tune my work-in-progress, Blood of the Mist, I am reading quite a few books and articles and blogs about writing. And I’m running into lots of talk about “character driven plots” and “plot driven stories.” And so I’m wondering, which comes first—the character or the story? Is one more important than the other? Is there actually a difference? I mean, really. You can’t have a plot without characters. And you can’t have characters without a plot. If it’s a story, the characters have to do something, don’t they? Otherwise you have a verbal still-life.

Okay, I know there is a difference between character driven stories and plot driven stories. I even think I have a pretty good grasp of the difference. A character driven story has a protagonist with depth. We get to see the inner workings, know the thoughts and emotions that are driving this character. A character driven story has a really well developed protagonist, a protagonist whose inner life is as intricately detailed as the outer trappings of the story, and part of the story essentially takes place inside the character, inside his thoughts and feelings. (This is, of course, an overly simplified definition, but it will do for my purposes.)

Conversely, when I think of a plot driven story, I think of stories with rather flat, two dimensional characters. Quite a few thriller/spy stories seem to fall more into this category. Really, though, I don’t think it’s possible to write a novel or short story and not have some content involving the protagonist’s inner life (if anyone has examples of such a story, please let me know; I’d love to have a look). So I don’t know if there really is such a thing as a purely plot driven story.

I think a story that is just about characters moving from point A to point B to point C, doing this and that and having this and that happen to them, falls into the realm of fables and fairy tales. Or possibly stories for very small children—think “Dick and Jane.” And while fables and fairy tales are stories, I don’t think they really fall into the realm of fiction or short stories. They are a category unto themselves, and I believe they fall outside the scope of my current meanderings.

Ah, I think I finally found my point in all of this, finally figured out what I was trying to tell myself. Plot is important—my characters need to do things, and those things should be important to the story and interesting. But without a rich inner life filled with its own conflicts and conundrums, my story will not be as vivid and resonant as I want it to be.

So why is this important? In Nancy Kress’ book Dynamic Characters (by the way, she has several good writing books out there—you should check them out), she writes, “People are endlessly fascinating, endlessly surprising, endlessly strange…If you start with people—characters—as you feel our way into your novel, it, too, can become fascinating, surprising and strange.

In short—real.”

And there’s my answer. There’s why I’ve been feeling like I need to do more with my characters, need to know more about them, need to change some things about them and what they’re doing. I don’t want just action and thrills and adventure. I want more. I want my story to be real, and for that, I need my characters to be real, too.

Story vs. Plot

Story. I love Story. I live for Story. Sometimes I live in Story. Story, for me, is the whole thing. The magic, the myth, the new world that, when the story is really good, I can scarcely tell apart from what we call the real world. Story is the living, breathing mystery that underlies the Universe.

I hope that I will manage to write Story and not just stories and tales. Because there is a difference, although I’m having a hard time articulating it.

Maybe I will just quote from Elizabeth Lyon in her book A Writer’s Guide to Fiction. “Story means the deepest meaning of a tale, while plot refers to the characters and the events that fulfill the story in a specific way. Story is deep; plot is mechanical, even if it is complex. Story is universal; plot is particular.”

Story is like the river flowing under and through and around everything. Plot, or a specific story, is like a fish or a rock or a bit of wood taken from the river. (Is that a completely corny analogy, or is it just me? I hope it makes some sense.) Story is like some underlying, Jungian archetype giving shape to the world it describes.

As a fairly inexperienced writer even after years of writing on and off, I am worried that I won’t manage to write Story. I don’t want just plot, just a string of happenings. I don’t even just want an interesting tale. I want the depth and breadth and intensity of the real thing. I want the grace of the first forest, the wisdom of the first people, the courage of the first explorers. I really want to write Story.

I don’t know that it’s something you can set out to do consciously, though. I will read Lyon’s book and see if she can give me hints about how to do it. But somehow I think it is more a process of learning to let the words swell in you and flow out through your pen. At first only stories will come. But if you open the way, and if you practice enough and learn the craft, then I think Story will come. I hope it will come.

I suppose for now I don’t need to really be worrying about this. First I need to finish my novel. Then I can see if there is Story or at least the potential for Story. And then I can decide what needs to be changed. And I can do the work and do the rewrites, and maybe when I am finished, I will have something recognizable as a small part of whole that makes up the Story of the world.